Principle One – Seek combinations of ingredients and dishes that offer more variety and complexity than the components eaten separately
I called ahead to Suzette from the road as I was coming home from my hearing in Las Cruces
When I sat down to eat with my client Scott Boyd I discovered that the combination of the soup and the stew had created a more delicious melding of flavor and texture. The stew’s thin Bechamel sauce smoothed out the Soup’s fibrous character and added a chunky texture and variety to the soup’s uni-dimensional texture and squash and ginger taste. The soup provided the blandly flavored stew an interesting pumpkin and ginger flavor. The two worked better as a dish together than separately and Suzette created a new, infinitely better dish by combining the two leftovers. Magic
This wedding of two dishes with different characteristics to make a more flavorful united new recipe is an foundational element of creating recipes from leftovers. I was not thinking about this combination when I bought the veal stew meat. I was only thinking about using the roasted vegetables and mushrooms I had been buying in a veal stew. It took Suzette’s creative thought of combining the two dishes to trigger the new more flavorful united whole. The Queen of Leftovers flashed her brilliance once again.
To illustrate the creative power of combining dishes with disparate ingredients, let me recount the explanation Rick Davis, the winemaker for Londer Vineyards, gave me for how Londer Vineyards created Londer’s very famous Parabol Pinot Noir. Rick said he and Larry had been tasting pinots and found one that had a very huge fruity front end and not much finish (a fruit bomb) and then they tasted a pinot with a lovely full finish but not much bouquet or front end fruitiness. When the mixed the two they discovered a huge wine with great front end fruitiness and great character in the finish (like the great French Pinots that leave a great taste in your mouth for minutes after you swallow). The effect of the combination of the two parts offered a more complex and satisfying flavors than its two parts separated. Besides being one of the guiding principals in wine making, this is one of the guiding principles of cooking leftovers.
Also, just as in wine making a mixture of different wines can have greater eye (color) appeal; the eye appeal of the scoop of the chunky whitish veal stew plopped down into the middle of the orange butternut squash soup was very appealing. Unfortunately we did not take a picture of that dish before we decided to combine the two, so here is a picture of the combined new dish. Please, let us know what you think.
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